Good afternoon. I am writing this newsletter from the Eurostar to Brussels. By the time it arrives in your inbox, I will have interviewed Mark Rutte, the secretary-general of NATO and one of the most important people in European defence, for Inside Defence, which is part of The Economist Insider, our new video series. Every month I will speak to some of the biggest and most interesting names in the world of military affairs and national security. You can tune in on October 14th.

This week I wanted to look back at the speeches given by Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump in Virginia to an audience of generals and admirals summoned from around the world. Mr Trump delivered a rambling, fulminating and frankly chilling speech in which he suggested to his commanders that they should focus on the “enemy from within”, a vague category into which he places many of his political opponents. American cities, he said, should be “training grounds” for the armed forces. The officers present were stony-faced, remaining silent despite Mr Trump’s exhortation to applaud.

Mr Hegseth’s remarks were different. He reiterated his complaint that the Pentagon had become the “woke department”. He said that he would change “stupid rules of engagement” and “untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralise, hunt and kill the enemies of our country” with “maximum lethality”. Before taking office, Mr Hegseth had dismissed the post-war Geneva Conventions as rules “written by dudes in cloakrooms in Europe after world war one because they thought they could fight polite wars”. Those laws, he said, were “written for us to lose”.

Some officers in the audience might well have wondered whether they might be given illegal orders to execute in the future. In recent weeks the administration officials said that members of drug cartels were “unlawful combatants” in a “non-international armed conflict” with America, which would allow them to be treated much like jihadists during the war on terror.

Mr Hegseth also talked about professional standards, especially those for dress, grooming and fitness. Part of that was about the role of women in the armed forces, a complex subject that I wrote about in January. But it was also about a sense that standards have dropped inside America’s armed forces. Have they? I wanted to end today’s newsletter not with the usual mailbag but by giving you insights from three people who wrote to me in the past week.

The first is a very thoughtful former American marine: